FAILED EFFORT LEAVES PREDATORS UNMOLESTED

The California Legislature and Gov. Jerry Brown certainly completed a large volume of work in the past legislative session, with the governor signing 800 bills and vetoing 96 others by Sunday’s deadline. Most of these deal with fairly narrow concerns and technical fixes pushed by interest groups.

Yet for all the time dealing with this avalanche of bills and amendments, the session yielded no progress on an issue of broad reach and deep importance to the large numbers of Californians who send their children to public schools.

Last Thursday, Brown vetoed AB 375, which was the latest attempt to deal with something that should be noncontroversial: the removal from the classroom of teachers who engage in sexual misconduct. The veto was cheered by school administrators and others who had pushed most vociferously for reforms that would ease the teacher-dismissal process. They argued that a bill that ostensibly would ease the process of removing bad teachers would actually make it harder.

Nearly two years ago, the Los Angeles Unified School District fired 61-year-old teacher Mark Berndt, who, according to The Associated Press, was later “charged with 23 counts of lewd acts upon children, ages 6 to 10, accused of feeding his semen to some students during ‘tasting games’ in his classroom from 2005 to 2010.”

The dismissal process was so bureaucratic and lengthy that the district ended up paying him $40,000 to drop his challenge to the firing and just go away. As a result of that horrific case, Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Los Angeles, last year introduced SB 1530, which would have streamlined the removal of these bad apples. It was killed in the Assembly.

“I think it’s shameful,” said LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy, after the legislation’s failure. “We basically have said that students who are brutally molested by employees, we cannot actually expedite their firing. I am disheartened, but undeterred.”

This session, Assemblywoman Joan Buchanan, D-San Ramon, introduced AB 375 to supposedly deal with the problem. The California Teachers’ Association’s President Dean Vogel bemoaned the Brown veto as a missed opportunity at reform, but the CTA-backed bill seemed more concerned about protecting teachers than students.

“It seems as though it put more roadblocks in the way,” said Dennis Meyers, an executive with the California School Boards Association. For instance, the bill would have limited the number of depositions and witnesses that an education agency could call in its efforts to build a case against a teacher.

It would also have imposed a seven-month deadline on completing the disciplinary hearing. That sounds as if it would expedite the firing process, but in reality it would have imposed a deadline without changing the rules that cause the process to drag on for so long, critics note. Accused teachers would be able to delay — and evade punishment if the process drags on past seven months.

Meyers points to the Berndt situation, arguing that the process is so “senselessly cumbersome” that districts end up settling with the teachers rather than adjudicating the case. And it’s tough enough to boot a teacher when the allegations are this grievous and criminal. It becomes far more difficult when districts are dealing with “inappropriate relationships, comments or touching,” he added.

“The (firing) path can be laborious and labyrinthine, in some cases involving years of investigation, union grievances, administrative appeals, court challenges and re-hearings,” according to a 2009 Los Angeles Times series. This is a long-standing and well-documented, statewide problem.

In his veto message, Brown said AB 375 made some “worthwhile adjustments to the dismissal process,” but found that “other changes make the process too rigid and could create new problems.” The veto is a pyrrhic victory for reformers, because they now are back to square one.

“Brown’s message is, ‘Try and do something better,’” said John Manly, an attorney who represents victims of child-sexual abuse. “Darn it, come up with something. … Make them pass a bill that you will sign.”

It’s hard not to be equally frustrated at a Legislature that spent so much time dealing with hundreds of arguably minor legislative matters, yet hasn’t made any progress on this major one.